NYRB: Marina Warner presents "Esmond & Ilia" with Frances Wilson

Marina Warner joins us to present her new book, "Esmond and Ilia: an Unreliable Memoir," in conversation with biographer and critic Frances Wilson. This virtual event, presented as part of our ongoing series with our friends at New York Review Books, took place on Zoom.
About the book:
Marina Warner’s father, Esmond, met her mother, Ilia, while serving as an officer in the British Army during the Second World War. As Allied forces fought their way north through Italy, Esmond found himself in the southern town of Bari, where Ilia had grown up, one of four girls of a widowed mother. The Englishman approaching middle age and the twenty-one-year-old Italian were soon married. Before the war had come to an end, Ilia was on her way alone to London to wait for her husband’s return and to learn how to be Mrs. Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman.
Ilia begins to learn the world of cricket, riding, canned food, and distant relations she has landed in, while Esmond, in spite of his connections, struggles to support his wife and young daughter. He comes up with the idea of opening a bookshop, a branch of W.H. Smith’s, in Cairo, where he had spent happy times during the North African campaign. In Egypt, however, nationalists are challenging foreign influences, especially British ones, and before long Cairo is on fire.
Deeply felt, closely observed, rich with strange lore, "Esmond and Ilia" is a picture of vanished worlds, a portrait of two people struggling to know each other and themselves, a daughter’s story of trying to come to terms with a past that is both hers and unknowable to her. It is an “unreliable memoir”-what memoir isn’t?-and a lasting work of literature, lyrical, sorrowful, shaped by love and wonder.
About our guests:
Marina Warner’s studies of religion, mythology, and fairy tales include "Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, From the Beast to the Blonde," "Stranger Magic" (National Book Critics Circle Award for Literary Criticism; Truman Capote Award), and "Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists." A Fellow of the British Academy, Warner is also a professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2015 she was given the Holberg Prize and in 2017 she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature.
Frances Wilson is a biographer and critic. "Burning Man: The Trials of D H Lawrence" is recipient of Biographer’s International Organisation’s 2022 Plutarch Award.